Back To The Arena: Toxikk

Toxikk wants to take you back to before the days of military shooters and sensible game names, when the arena FPS ruled and all followed in its wake. Reakktor Studios (who previously worked on shooty MMOs Neocron and Black Prophecy) are heavily pushing the old school feel, seemingly drawing a lot from the best arena FPS ever. But the trailer, which you’ll find below, focuses mainly on what the game is not and what it does not feature: microtransactions, reloading, iron sights, regenerating health, and so on. Hmm.

Don’t get me wrong – this is exciting to me. I just don’t like the way it’s being presented. Sure, the odd throwback is welcome, but I can’t get behind selling a game on what it’s not. Hell, arena shooters could even be a great fit for free-to-play, selling player skins and weapon models without a hint of pay-to-win. Not doing that? Fine, but that’s not the most interesting thing about your game.

As for what Toxikk actually is, it’s full of ye olde Unreal Tournament-y things like double-jumps, dodges, health packs, alt-fire modes, wacky weapons, and maps split between small arenas and bigguns with vehicles. It’ll also have tools to create maps, models, and skins, though they’ll need to go through through a voting process to reach the game.

Reakktor are A-ok with the modern developments of crowdfunding and Early Access, mind. They’re currently doing the former on their website, selling keys with beta access from $15, which will become useful when Early Access starts towards the end of this year. Given the heavy Unreal Tournament influence, it seems like they’ll have some stiff competition, as that’s when Epic plan to launch their F2P new UT into open beta.